Data 311 - Lecture 1

What is Data Science?

• Machine learning
• Statistics!
• Finding patterns in data that humans can't find
• Data "decomposition"
• Organizing data for people
• Making data comprehensible
• Making pretty graphs and tables

My take: The process and/or study of extracting insights from data.

What do Data Scientists do?

• Cleaning
• Analyzing
• Manipulating / reorganizing
• Find patterns
• Create models based on data
• Make predictions
• Drawing conclusions about data

My take:

• Answer questions
• Discover patterns, trends, insights
• Make predictions

What is Data?

• measurements taken in an attempt to understand or quanitfy something
• collection of related information
• actions that are informational
• precursor to information

Properties of data

• structured or unstructured
• numerical or categorical
• big or small